Nowadays, a great many computers can communicate with one another over networks. One such network is the Internet, the use of which has expanded greatly in recent years (and is expected to continue). One significant way in which the Internet is used is the World Wide Web (also referred to as the “web”), which is a collection of documents (referred to as simply “web pages”) that users can view or otherwise render and which typically include links to one or more other pages that the user can access. These web documents are typically stored as one or more files at a remote location, being accessed by a user via his or her computer and the Internet.
Web pages are accessed for a wide variety of different reasons. By way of example, web pages may be accessed to test a web browser (an application program that manages the rendering of web pages to a user). By way of another example, web pages may be accessed by a user to view information he or she is interested in (e.g., an audio and/or video program, information describing products or services that a company offers, etc.).
Unfortunately, the selection and loading of web pages is currently a largely manual process. For example, selection of a set of web pages that are to be used to test a web browser is performed by a user manually typing in the paths and names of each web page in the test set. These web page identifiers are then individually selected by the user to access the identified page (causing the web browser to load the page and thereby test proper operation of the browser). By way of another example, a web search engine may identify multiple web pages that match a set of search criteria, but the user is then required to access each of the resulting web pages manually. Such manual processes, however, can be tedious and time-consuming on the part of the user, as well as error-prone.
The invention described below addresses these disadvantages, providing automatic file searching and accessing.